Benefits of the Premier League ‘golden age’ have not been equally shared

The 30th anniversary of the Premier League will bring a million hot takes and many of them will refer to a ‘golden age’. But is this even true?

Over the summer that marks the 30th anniversary of the commencement of the Premier League, we’ll probably hear a lot of talk about how this is a ‘golden age’ for the division. But while there will be plenty of people who will happily tell you that this isn’t the case on several subjective measures, financially speaking it’s certainly true, and the primary driver behind what has become a vast gulf in financial resources has been television money.

But even allowing for the fact that we know this in the abstract, the figures are certainly startling. In the summer of 1996, Germany beat England on penalty kicks in the semi-finals of the European Championships. At that time, the annual television revenue of the Premier League was €685m while for the Bundesliga it was €444m, a difference of €241m. But by 2022, the Premier League was making £6.1bn, while the Bundesliga was ‘only’ making £3bn. At the end of the 2018/19 season, for example, relegated Huddersfield Town picked up £96.6m in television and prize money, more than Bayern Munich received after winning the Bundesliga.

The story is the same when comparing the Premier League to the rest of Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues. The Premier League now makes £2.7bn per year more than La Liga, £3.8bn more than Serie A, and £4.4bn more than Ligue Un. And this has had an impact upon balances of power within the European club game. In the ten years from 1996, English clubs reached the final of the Champions League or the Europa League on five occasions. For the ten years from 2012 on it was 12 times, including three all-English finals.

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